Blog Post #5: 80/20 Rule

At first glance, it may not seem relevant to talk about the 80/20 rule in regards to my animation. More commonly seen within interactive designs, the 80/20 rule states that approximately 80 percent of the effects in a design are caused by 20 percents of the variables within it. So for example, 80 percent of someone’s progress may come from 20 percent of their work. Use of this principle ensures efficiency within designs, as it often helps people access more vital features faster and can also show designers where the most time and effort need to be spent.

So it may seem strange to talk about it within a context of an animation that has a set running time and lacks direct interaction with the audience. However, I have noticed that about 80 percent of the data required to be shown in the Ningaloo Destination model is presented within 20 percent of my animations running time. Of about the two minute play time for my introductory video, only about 30 seconds or so actually consists of motion-based graphics. It is within this time the most pressing information that the client wished to show is presented and explained to the audience.

These infographics followed a blueprint style, using clever visual metaphors to support what was being explained verbally by the characters at the time. I kept these intentionally short and to the point, splitting them up with animated scenes of the main characters and elements of humor. This was done for two reasons, so that the viewers would only absorb the truly important information and so that they wouldn’t be bored by needless amounts of text or infographics. This is where the 80/20 rule is apparent. The audience is only really needs to pay attention to 20 percent of the animation in order to gain 80 percent of the information they need to know.

However, in my second animation that follows the introduction, you can clearly see the use of the 80/20 rule breaking down. This animation was done as an example of how I would present the information relating to each scenario if my model was chosen. Originally I had wanted to include more involvement of the main characters and humor to break up scenes similarly to the introductory video, but as time ran out I ended up having to scrap it in favor of presenting the information which the client actually required. At about 6 minutes running time, with about 5 of those being focused on monotonous motion graphics being read out by the Narrator character, the scales were tipped to be more along the lines of 80% of the information being presented in 90% of the running time. The results of this swap were clearly shown to me. While most peopled laughed and enjoyed the introductory animation, this example left them growing bored and unimpressed. And I too felt that way, realizing the infographics went on for far too long and my piece ultimately suffers for it.

If anything is to be learnt, it’s that my destination model shows that the 80/20 rule is very beneficial to the efficiency of getting information across to viewers. While my introductory animation that paid close attention to its scales gets a warm response and successfully educated the audience, my second attempt that drastically tipped the scales lost a lot of focus and therefore